Friday, October 23, 2015

What is an Interactive Visual Gamebook Adventure?

Simply put, a gamebook is a printed book in which the reader takes control over the main character by making choices that affect the storyline and therefore the final outcome of the adventure. You "play" a gamebook by trying to guess the correct actions for your character and make him/her follow the right path to the successful ending of the story.

Assuming that most of the readers of this blog are already familiar with the Gamebooks genre, I am going to continue to the second important word in the slogan: VISUAL

Second, we are going to explain why the word VISUAL exists in the above sentence.

To do so, I need to share with you that as a teenager, I enjoyed the Gamebook Adventures very much. However, very often I found the sections of those books filled with too much text for my liking, forcing me to quick scan the text for the possible outcome and moving right to the decision making process. There is a very fine line between telling a good story and boring the reader out with too much text.

I believe that the solution to the problem of balance between telling a good story and boring the reader out with too much text is to use visual stimulation. Sure enough, a single picture can't completely replace a good sentence that will let you dive deep into the story, just like a movie is often not as good as reading the book it is based on. That is why, the balance between text and picture is very important too and there is much more room for appeal to the average consumer here.

Another reason for really going forward with this idea of mine is not only that I've been thinking about it longer than 20 years, but also the fact that Gamebooks fail to completely satisfy the human senses such as sight (visual) and hearing (audio) when Video Games are focusing exclusively on the senses and reflexes, failing entirely to give the player satisfaction of making choices that can affect the outcome of the story - positive or negative. I just can't believe that the video game developers have been failing in that aspect ever since the beginning of the computer game genre.

I will review more on that and on the psychology aspect of playing games in my third post.